The Essentials of a Marketing Presentation: The 5 M’s

Marketing presentations take many forms, but probably the most common is presenting a new marketing initiative/campaign internally to the rest of your company. Be it at the kick-off of a sprint, the start of a new quarter, or as your team is embarking on a big event; you need to convey what the Marketing team is about to do without boring the tech team to tears.

So what are the essential elements in your marketing presentation? Just remember the 5 M’s and you’ll have a quick slideshow about 5 to 8 minutes long, that will inform the rest of your company of everything that they need to know.

The Motivation

AKA: The Market Share, The Missing Audience, The Mission

This is the why of this particular marketing initiative which always comes down to “who are you trying to reach?” Think of this as the “pain point” of your company’s current audience limitations that Marketing is trying to address. Is it a certain demographic that’s lagging behind in sales and brand awareness? Is it a whole new audience that you’re trying to reach with the launch of a new product or service?

While this aspect of your presentation is most likely where your Marketing team has done the most research (after all, how else would you know the people to target?), the rest of your audience will only need a graphical representation of how your company is lacking in this space. If you only have 20% market share when it should be more like 80%, visualize that statistic (see the circle example above) so you quickly get this point across.

What to skip:Why you were lagging behind. It doesn’t really matter why XYZ demographic wasn’t marketed to until now. That’s a discussion mostly for your team, not to the rest of the departments. All that’s important is that you’re addressing the missing demo now. Excluding this from your marketing presentation will not only save time, but also avoid unwanted questions and criticisms.

The Message

AKA: The Marketing, The Modified Pitch, The Material

This is the what of your Marketing initiative. To reach this new audience, what is being marketed? Is it a new product? A new message? Something has to be different about this message, otherwise what’s the point of this presentation? Here is where you lay out exactly what is different about your core messaging that will resonate with this targeted audience.

For example, this could be a new slogan that you’ll contrast with the old slogan. “It just works.” “Just for the taste of it.” “Have you had your break today?” Each time corporations changed up their slogan, they were changing up their marketing message. Nail down what is the key fundamental difference in your new messaging compared to your old, and present just that to your company. They don’t need to know how you arrived at it, but they do need to know what the new messaging is since it can affect design, sales, and general thought process.

What to skip:How you came up with the new hotness. The other departments won’t care about either your lightning bolt inspiration or the market research you did. They don’t need to hear about the creative journey (unless it’s a full company rebranding effort), just the destination and the new message you’ll be using.

The Method

AKA: The Marketing Strategy, The Modus Operandi, The Moves

This is the meat of the presentation that might take up two whole slides: how you’re planning on achieving the marketing success your team is looking for. Here is where you lay out the basic strategy and the methods you’ll be using to reach the target audience.

Don’t waste time on the “business as usual” marketing approaches. In other words, if your efforts always involve email marketing, you can mention it on a slide but focus your presentation more on the unique part of this particular marketing effort. Are you partnering with a new Influencer? Is there a new promotion deal you’re offering? Even if there are no “new” strategies per se, highlight the new approach for your standard strategies. Your audience will only retain what’s different, not the status quo.

What to skip:The nitty gritty details. The rest of the company doesn’t need to know, for example, the specifics on what SEO changes will be made. They just need to know that SEO is happening. You can tell them that you’ll be launching new AdWords campaigns; you don’t need to tell them the keywords you’ll be bidding on, or the CPC of each one. Presenters get enamored with the finer details of their marketing strategy all the time, but this section of your marketing presentation should stay high-level. Think H1 headers, not the body copy.

The Metrics

AKA: The Money, The Milestones, The Mark of Success

This is where your numbers go. Mostly for the executives in the room, but also so your team keeps itself accountable; you’ll want to lay out the metrics for success and failure. Whether it’s a new customer acquisition rate or total number, or leads in the pipeline, or simply sales figures attributed to the marketing campaign; this is where you lay out the stakes.

While it’s fine to put individual goal numbers next to each marketing channel (ie. goal for email, goal for paid search, goal for organic, etc), make sure there is a summary metrics that the audience can walk away with. No one will retain the piece-meal stats, but they will remember “the ultimate goal is to increase market share by 20%.” Pro tip: set a conservative goal and a reach goal. That way, when you reach your reach goal (which, surprisingly, you always manage to do. It helps when you set your own reach goal, FYI.), the company will remember that it was a reach goal.

What to skip:Metrics with decimals. Usually the metrics that the rest of the office doesn’t care about (or won’t retain) are ones like CPC, CPA, CTR, etc. And those just happen to be the ones that use decimals the most. Focus more on the metrics that use commas, as in, 10,000 new customers, or $20,000 in revenue. Commas denote large numbers, which will excite and stick in their minds. Decimals will be forgotten in 0.5 seconds.

The Means

AKA: The Main Event

A great presentation saves the best part for last and this is the audience interaction segment of your marketing presentation. Basically, here’s where you lay out what you need from the other departments to make this marketing initiative work. Unless your team is huge, you will probably need some Dev support, or maybe input from the Sales teams. At the end of the day, people watching your slideshow will mostly be thinking “do I have to do anything for this?” This section is the most relevant to them, which is why it’s saved for last.

Also, this naturally involves Q&A, which is another reason it’s at the end as it dove tails nicely into questions. Now that they have all the information you have, it’s time to open it up to address any concerns.

A summary slide should not only summarize the marketing campaign, but structure the information in a way that also lays out what each department’s tasks are to make the initiative work (ie, Devs do this, Sales do this, Design do this, etc). Ending on this slide makes it easy for the team leads to confer and ask questions.